Politics

Ivan Krstic: In fact, I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn’t want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward. New York Magazine: The Democratic Party is closer than it’s ever been to…

These banners are hung in two windows of the same house, less than a block north of my own. I think it pretty much sums up the entire election.

Obama: But I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union. For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means…

I’m interviewing voters as they come out of the voting booths in Oakland, Piedmont and Lafayette today for the NYT’s online feature “Voices from the Polls”. Check it out here. Update: I had to go all the way out to Danville to find Republicans. Seriously.

I was out doing errands this afternoon and saw Obama supporters staked out at the intersections of Ashby Ave./Claremont Ave., Keith/College Ave. (Rockridge BART), and Broadway and 51st St. They were waving signs and banners at passing cars. Over the last few months, I’ve seen a few Clinton stickers around and two Edwards banners, but for the most part, this neighborhood seems to be Obama country, through and through.

Slate: In turn, Barack Obama’s candidacy marks the fulfillment of the 15th Amendment guaranteeing black suffrage. Whereas Romney is the most aristocratic candidate, Obama is the least. Not because he is biracial, but because he is self-made. His parents had little wealth, prestige, and power to pass on, and both are now dead. He has chosen his own faith as an adult (Protestant Christianity, as it happens), and he remains far and away the least wealthy of the Big Four.…

Big ups once again to Daniel Hernandez for his commentary on last night’s All Things Considered : “Age, Not Race, Splits Latinos’ Democratic Vote”. As he blogs: Friends, my latest commentary for NPR’s “All Things Considered” ran today. It addresses the question of whether “Latino” “tensions” and “unease” with “blacks” will prevent “Latinos” from voting for “the black candidate,” Barack Obama, in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary season. Please listen here. A bunch of those terms up there are in…

The New Yorker: The alternatives facing Democratic voters have been characterized variously as a choice between experience and change, between an insider and an outsider, and between two firsts—a woman and a black man. But perhaps the most important difference between these two politicians—whose policy views, after all, are almost indistinguishable—lies in their rival conceptions of the Presidency. Obama offers himself as a catalyst by which disenchanted Americans can overcome two decades of vicious partisanship, energize our democracy, and restore…

So what does Barack Obama have that the other candidates don’t? Ringtones, baby, ringtones. Seriously.